A Passage of Stars by Kate Elliott Read Free Book Online

motor.
    Directly across from her, plastine two-by-fours boarded up the entrance to a shop; faded letters peeled off from the wall. Nearby, a lean-to of scrap metal jutted out into the corridor. Children, their faces colored in wild patterns with tattoos, gawked at her. A woman sat in a stain of wetness, singing in a loud, tuneless voice. Blue-and-orange checks patterned her hands and arms. A disfiguring burn that covered her left eye and cheek and ear marred the broader pattern on her face. Two men and a woman, dressed in identical cheap synthetics, spat on the woman as they passed her and paused to eye Lily with curiosity. Tattooed children cowered as the three walked on down the corridor. A tattooed shopkeeper, arms and legs a riot of purple swirls, bobbed up and down in a frenzy of bowing as the trio halted by him. One of the men spoke; something changed hands; they went on.
    “Hoy.” Lily turned to go in the same direction. “They could have warned me.” She stepped carefully over a pile of filthy rags, shifted to avoid the weaving path of a man whose face was mottled with blue dots and a suppurating rash, and made her way down the corridor. Litter lay strewn across the street. Children picked through it. Under a ripped and dirty awning, scrawny adolescents, dressed in clothing that revealed the elaboration of tattooed decoration on their bodies, beckoned to Lily as she passed.
    The lock into the next section was closed. She shifted from one foot to the other. Two dark alleys, shortcuts, branched off on either side of the seal. The lock blinked green; she stepped in and waited in the five-meter-square dead zone as it shut, repressurized—a moment of lightness as the gravity field switched placement—and opened into the next section.
    Like the other, this section curved away, alleys, shabby storefronts, and docking entrances breaking the dull sheen of wall. The untattooed trio she had seen before stood ahead at the curve, surrounding a tattooed woman who seemed to be pleading with them. As Lily approached she saw the woman give a handful of beads to one of the men. Again they paused to glance at Lily before they went on. The tattooed woman, weeping, ran into her shop.
    Lily came to the lock. A tattooed man in poor but neat clothing bowed to her from his storefront. Behind him, a clean child swept under the awning, careful with the orderly display of homewares. Lily smiled at the man, and he smiled back, bobbing again, as the lock opened and she stepped in with two other people.
    Immediately she saw a difference. The storefronts onto the next corridor were lit and in good repair, and each establishment name was suffixed by the official section number, F1. And at least half these people were not tattooed. For the first time, she saw the occasional black-and-gray uniform of Security personnel.
    In section F2, a few of the businesses had signs: “No tattoos allowed.” “Ridani not spoken here.” Machines droned in the background. One front advertised a school, another a medical clinic.
    In the next lock, a good dozen people passed through with Lily to the main sections. Five brightly dressed pygmies, their two-fingered, two-clawed hands waving frantically in the air as they talked, hurried into a well-lit alley that would lead, Lily knew, to one of the low-gravity sections where they lived. Two women sat conversing at a street-side cafe, a thin tattooed girl standing behind them holding their packages. A cargo robot motored carefully down the corridor. With her neat tunic and trousers and clear skin, Lily rated scarcely a passing glance. The one tattooed girl who walked alone up the street, not carrying anything, was stared at. Even the pygmies, barely a meter tall, with their half-human, half-birdlike features, were considered commonplace.
    In the next section at least four corridors thrust out from a main square. A small computer gazebo in the center displayed, after several transactions, a map of Station. Lily cast